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Madden 06 PSP = Disc loading hell sez 1up.com

From 1up.com:

Score: 6.9

With so much going for it, this could have been a fabled rookie sensation, were it not for the game's Achilles' heel. All that content proves to be technologically overwhelming; a problem that manifests itself the most in rampant loading issues. The warning signs are there from the very beginning when the long start-up load fakes you out by stopping to deliver EA's trademark "It's in the game," only to go back to loading again before finally reaching the main menu.

It only goes downhill from there. The game is significantly disrupted by mid-play pauses to load. Anytime there is a turnover, the action freezes while the disk is accessed. Incomplete passes and sideline routes are another frequent culprit. And even when the play comes off without a hitch you'll still have to wait for a load before moving on to the next down. As a result, the usual 5 minute quarter game will drag on three, maybe even four, times as long as it should.

And all that loading is double-whammy. Not only does it increase the length of each game, it puts a heavy drain on the battery. You probably won't make it all the way over the hills and through the woods to grandmother's house playing Madden PSP on one charge, much less if you turn on the Wi-Fi adapter.

They say basically the same thing about the loading issues but still give it a good score:

The flaws that show up in Madden 06 on PSP are easy to ignore in the beginning. That first initial load screen comes up and it just chugs. When you hop into a quick game, and you select past a few menu screens, you run into more chugging. All of sudden, that quick pick-up and play nature I'm looking for gets a bit hazy. Once you finally make it into the game (after more chugging with more loading), you haven't quite escaped the chugging. With every a play, every transition, from screen to screen, there's a pauses or stutters.

When you're warming up and playing the game for the first time, it's not a noticeable because you're thinking about strategy and you don't mind the time the game spends chugging. But when you find your rhythm, and the plays you like, and you know what you want to do with your team, all the pauses and stutters just drag on the experience. Some pauses are longer than others, so much so, that you think the game might have crashed, but it's really just loading the next screen. Maybe if screen transitions were the only pauses to worry about, the flaw wouldn't be as noticeable. But you'll find these issues in game as well. It'll happen a split second before a reception, or right before a tackle. At the very moment a play is complete and the announcer is about to speak, there's a pause that brings everything to a halt. One of the most heavily lauded features of Madden has always been the speed and fluidity of everything. That magical flow that gets things clicking for me when I'm playing is interrupted by the constant pausing through-out the game on PSP.

Anyways, been years since I seriously committed to a football video game so I will have to weigh this one carefully. A friend of mine plans on getting it so I can at least try it out. It's pretty neat it has full online and you can load your PS2 to the EA locker and use in the game.